ABSTRACT
Around 1820 a new type of building appeared in European cities, for example in
Paris and London, when, at the fringes of the residential areas, new suburbs
appeared: no longer the aristocratic suburbs of second homes – country houses
where one might go pour souper in the evening – but suburbs of the bourgeois,
which claimed to be able simultaneously to enjoy the advantages of both the
city and the countryside in dwellings of relatively modest size. In spite of this
change of the layout of the Enlightenment city, the definition of the city in
French dictionaries remained that of the Encyclopédie, and beyond that of the
great authoritative treatises of classical architecture from the second half of the
seventeenth century onwards. The city, which was created in a supposedly
spontaneous way according to requirements of the moment, was thus gener-
ally defined by its limits (whether of military or of tax-related origin) and by the
accumulation of houses and by their regular distribution along the streets. From
selected elements (the wall, the street) and relations (assemblage, disposition,
etc.) the definition of the city, not only in general but also in more specialized
dictionaries, seems to remain immutable. In the Dictionnaire de l’Académie
Française published in 1694, the city is ‘an assembly of several houses laid out
by streets and closed by a common limit which is usually of walls and ditches’,
just as in the Dictionnaire National of Bescherelle the elder, published in 1846,
it is ‘an assembly of a great number of houses laid out by streets, and often
surrounded by a common limit, which is usually of walls and ditches’. Of
course one might suppose that there might be a time-lag between changes in
the city and the lexicographers catching up with them, but these definitions do
not include the softened city edge that was being made by some innovative
picturesque estates, which indeed explicitly called into question such a
definition.